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Civil society and governance form key issues of concern among academia, leadership and international organizations considering the importance of cementing democracy and strengthening individual rights. The issue is significant in the case of China as scholars have written about the mutual interplay between both in order to explore the nature of political freedom and exercise of party control in China. Noted works like Civil Society and Governance in China (2012) by Jianxing Yu and Sujian Go have analysed this question based on a theoretical understanding and empirical case study of China. While in Karla W. Simon’s work Civil Society in China: The Legal Framework from Ancient Times to the ‘New Reform Era’ (2013) the question that China lacks a history of civic participation is challenged with a detailed analysis of the re-emergence of a vibrant civil society in China under government constraints.

There is a kind of negativity which is inherent to ‘toleration’, and so has it been all through with ‘liberal toleration’. Unfortunately, there have been far too few studies on the conceptual moorings of ‘toleration’ which only makes one wonder when commentators and scholars will start respecting the differences rather than merely tolerating them.Although Roover recognizes the negativity of liberal toleration, he doesn’t tell us anything about the negativity that ‘toleration’ as a concept is impregnated with, but he does introduce us to the negativity that ‘liberal toleration’ as a model of containing conflict and managing diversity is imbued with. Roover suggests that the contemporary liberal model of toleration is not only deficient in obviating the resurgence of religion in the public sphere, but it inherently carries in itself certain forms of intolerance towards the entities which fail to conform to the public/private distinction. Researching the contemporary with what I may call conceptual etymology, Roover tries to explain how and why secularism in the contemporary form remains incapable of obviating the current conflict and managing the presence of religion in the public sphere and how it carries certain forms of intolerance. This question remains the focus of this book.

North Korea never fails to amaze. It is the only country that has managed to fool all its people for all the time and has silenced them so completely even in this age of internet explosion. Anjaly Thomas confirms this in her book There are No Gods in North Korea. She visited that country for five days, under considerable personal risk. She has made an honest attempt to present the facts about North Korea without embellishment.

Why is the United States the most powerful country in the world today? I always pose this question to students in my inaugural lecture on contemporary Southeast Asia. Students provide several answers. The United States is the most powerful country in the world; it has vast economic resources; technologically it is the most advanced country, etc. While the above answers contain elements of truth, I clinch the issue by stating that the United States is the first country in the world to realize that knowledge is power. American Universities—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT to name some—attract the best talents from countries across the world and they set in motion concepts and ideas which we in the rest of the world blindly accept.

The book under review by Jan Breman, one of the most significant contributors to the literature in the Indian subcontinent on the rural economy in the past several decades, is a departure from, yet connected to the area of rural economy. Explaining this the author remarks that despite conducting the large part of his almost five decades of research in Gujarat, it was this study which made him ‘realize more than before that the limited time spells that the labour migrants stay in the city’ (due to their expulsion from agricultural work), ‘are linked not only to the way the labour market operates at the bottom of the informal economy but also and to no lesser extent due to political and administrative barriers in establishing a foothold of sorts.

Postcolonial criticism at one time was regarded as the harbinger of a new ethical framework in cultural studies, especially in the western academy. With the rise of the discourse of globalization in the 1990s postcolonial discourse appeared to lose much of its currency and critical energy, since its central issues such as colonizer/colonized, East/West and centre/margin, the cornerstones of postcolonial criticism, were no longer applicable to the global era with the blurring of national boundaries. Globalization is a transformation of the entire world system, and it affects not only the metropolitan centres of the world but also its most remote margins. On the other hand it effects a levelling out of heterogeneity or difference.